1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and an information processing method, and is preferably applied to, for example, a management server that manages an application server and a storage device in a storage system.
2. Description of Related Art
The popularization of e-commerce and an increase in the use of multimedia data have lead to a rapid increase in the amount of data handled by businesses. In such an environment, techniques related to SANs (Storage Area Networks) that are capable of effectively handling large amounts of data are becoming widespread.
Although the introduction of a SAN increases the flexibility of a corporate information system, the introduction of the SAN also complicates the configuration of storage devices as well as configuration of the devices to be performed by a system administrator. In addition, with the centralization of storage device management, not only does the amount of data to be handled by a single system administrator increase, but the number of types of application server OSs and business applications also increases. Furthermore, the ever-increasing amount of data requires that operations for augmenting storage devices and assigning storage to application servers be frequently performed.
Conventionally, a method for simplifying the assignment of storages to application servers has been proposed in which a volume to be assigned to each application is selected based on the requirement characteristic of each application and the volume characteristic of each volume (refer to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-334561). This method is advantageous in that an appropriate volume having a performance required by an application can be assigned to the application.